Fen Spinner
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Fen Spinner is an English-speaking pen spinning community created on July 30th, 2020 by V 0 1 D. After frequent disagreements with staff from The Workshop leading up to September that year, Fen Spinner became public and the membership greatly increased, claiming to be a new community separate from those typically associated with UPSB. The community hub is primarily a public Discord server with a secondary website, Fen Spinner Wiki. The community participated in SpinFest 2021.
History
Fen Spinner was originally created on the 30th of July, 2020 to serve as a hangout for several members of the private team OPSD to interact with non-members outside of the major public communities. It served as a social space with little to no rules until September 11th, when several events leading on for several months changed the server's direction. Numerous prior disagreements had taken place between Fen Spinners and the administration of The Workshop, criticizing The Workshop for heavy-handed moderation, ignoring community input and being selective about rules. The administration dismissed all complaints and labeled critics as ungrateful children.
Split from The Workshop
On September 11th 2020, Fen Spinner members joined a voice channel in The Workshop and decided to make the largest video call on the server, resulting in a peak of 30 simultaneous users. Moderators of The Workshop were invited to also join in, but declined. The The Workshop's '#voice-text' channel had been scrolling at a dizzying rate of message and image posts, some pen spinning related and some not. There was no previous precedent for what could or could not be posted in the text channel; memes and unrelated content appeared many times before between users, just not at the same rate.
The administrator (retired as of 2021) Coffeelucky began demanding that people leave the channel and move everyone into a private group call. This was met with ridicule as the limit for group calls is 10 users, less than half the people present. Making matters worse the demand was changed to making and moving all 30 people to a new server, at which point the users of the voice channel started ignoring the demands.. The tone shifted to complaints about moderation, particularly criticizing how rules were enforced against people the administration did not like rather than being used to maintain order. An offensive meme was posted of the 2001 September 11 attacks depicting Fen Spinner about to fly into The Workshop while UPSB was on fire next to it.
The call continued until the early hours of the 12th, with no punishments appearing until after the voice channel was vacant. The day after it was discovered that The Workshop had given out punishments during the night, omitting reasons and instead providing the generic "Spam" label to bans, mutes and warnings. Notably V 0 1 D was banned for 7 days and Zxntle muted for 14 days. The reasons for the punishments took a further 2 weeks to ascertain, with users decrying the punishments and criticizing the administration on the reasons, which did not begin to be explained until V 0 1 D was unbanned a week later.
It was eventually revealed that Zxntle had been muted for saying "Bruh" in reply to Coffeelucky and that V 0 1 D had been warned (but not banned) for the offensive meme being posted. The reason for the ban has never been given. In the process the moderator abc quit The Workshop, with the administration then falsely alleging that he had been harassed out, but being unable to provide any examples of him receiving abuse, but with counterexamples being shown that he had given out abuse himself. Members DanyOn and Blizzardous left the server in protest of the administration, and moderator DarkT falsely claimed Blizzardous broke rules himself and was not a valuable member of the community. Blizzardous had a clean record and had initially been offered the post of moderator instead of abc, but had declined the position.
With nothing resolved on The Workshop's end, and baseless claims of harassment being made by the administration, a significant chunk of the active English-speaking community moved to Fen Spinner and other servers for socialization.
SpinFest 2021
In November 2020[1], sign-ups for SpinFest 2021 took place, with a number of positions available for communities to enter. Fen Spinner was submitted to the draft and, after the mistake of India's community applying late, managed to make it into the lineup[2]. Original plans for a parody video as the first major release from the Fen Spinner community were quickly scrapped, with ambitious plans being drawn for a genuine show of the community's ability. On April 12th 2021, after months of editing and filming, "Fen Spinner 1st" was released[3] to the international community as the SpinFest submission, defying those who claimed a troll CV would be submitted to SpinFest. Edited by V 0 1 D, it featured prolific use of 3D graphics and special effects, and featured 11 spinners from the community.